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Sunday, November 28, 2010

Lazy Sunday Service

A freezing weekend in Ireland. The deal to bail the country out is to be announced in the next hour. It'll take generations to pay it off. By 2014, somewhere between 20 to 25% of tax collected will be used to pay back the loan and its interest. Ireland will be in every economics textbook about how to build an economic miracle, then slam it into the ground with enough velocity that it'll take years to get out of the resultant hole, and then rather than trying to climb out to keep digging. The powerlessness to do anything but watch slack-jawed is incredibly frustrating.

I've spent the last three days doing the index to the Code/Space book for MIT Press. It is incredibly tedious and I'm still going. I hope someone actually uses the thing for all the effort it's taking!

I've done all the indexes to my books, except the first one and the last one, and also the encyclopedia. The first one was hopeless and I vowed to do them all after that. I got lazy on the last one and it cost me 800 pounds (1250 US dollars), to be deducted from royalties. The encyclopedia took some poor sod a year to do given it was 5 million words long. Once I've finished, it will have taken me about 25-27 hours to index 100,000 words. It really is very tedious, but it's saving some money and I know that the index will work as intended.

About Me

I'm a professor at the National University of Ireland Maynooth and the author of four crime novels and two collections of short stories, and author or editor of 25 academic books and a 12 volume encyclopedia. My passions are reading and writing crime fiction and undertaking research on social issues. The other blogs I contribute to are Ireland After NAMA and The Programmable City.